The Lioness

Chapter Twelve

“Can we go back?” Kerian asked, sitting across a dwindling fire from Jeratt.

Outside, beyond the sheltering hills known as King’s Haunting, the wind moaned, sounding like ghosts to give the place a name. Legends told of dead kings slipping in and out of the shadows of these hills, kings of elves, kings of dwarves, even a goblin king or two… or whatever passed for a king among the goblins who roamed in the Stonelands. The wind made good stories with the night, but pretty much everyone knew where their kings were buried and where they haunted. Behind Kerian and Jeratt, in the shelter of the smallest hill’s stony shoulder, Ander slept, or pretended to. Kerian cocked an eye at him. The boy kept very still beneath his blankets.

Jeratt didn’t look where she did. He seldom looked at the boy and neither spoke to the other unless he must.

“Ah, Kerian,” he said, “you do seem to be a woman who makes a habit of getting thrown out the door, don’t you?” He poked at the fading fire with the stick they’d used to spit the lean hares that had been their supper. “I think we can go back. Sooner or later. Right now the camp behind the falls is gone, broken up and scattered across the forest. They heard about the hunt for you even before I got back to tell ’em.”

“Who did you tell then?”

He pulled a lean smile. “Elder. Old woman don’t run fast, so she don’t run at all. She was there, sitting by her fire and taking care of herself. I don’t expect anyone will find the way to her if she doesn’t want them to, do you?”

Kerian didn’t. “Why did the others leave?”

“They left because they wouldn’t be confined, even by Elder’s magic. She let ’em. She’s no jailer. They’ll be back, once they feel it’s safe to run there again.”

They were like animals, Kerian thought, a band of outlaws who didn’t fight for ground, didn’t hold land. Threatened, they cleared out until they could return to the good hunting ground again. Like shadows, they lived outside the society of the kingdom.

“They ain’t got no grudge against you, Kerianseray,” Jeratt said “It happens. You get found, you have to run. You come back if you can.”

She looked at him levelly. “And you? It seems you don’t feel quite the same way.”

“Me?” Jeratt shrugged. “I’m here, ain’t I? Told you I would be.”

He looked around at the enclosing darkness, up to the starred sky between the hills. “We have to say away from the others for a while. We need to figure where to go next. Elder says the hunt for you has spread beyond Sliathnost again. They know you’re nearby, those Knights.” He spat. “If yon boy didn’t turn them on you, one of his fine friends or neighbors did. They’re swarming all over the hills.”

He coughed softly, and jerked his head in a northerly direction, toward Qualinost. “You ever see any maps of the kingdom while you were chattin’ with him—your king?”

She hid a smile at his attempt at delicacy. “A few. You want me to speak a map or draw one?”

“Ach, don’t speak it. That’s a pretty thing you Wilder Elves do, but I’ve not much use for that way of mappin’. Put it right out on the ground so I can see it, will you?”

Kerian took the spit, the tip dark as charcoal now, and began to sketch a map on the clear ground. She showed the several streams running away from Lightning Falls, some flowing due south, others wandering away west to fill little lakes in the foothills of the Kharolis Mountains.

“Here,” she said, drawing a large, ragged oval well below Qualinost and west of the city. “This is a lake whose feeder streams run out through the densest part of the forest, all the way to where the mountains wrap around north again. Past that spur of mountain is even more forest, far more than on the eastern side. After that, the sea. Ever been there?”

Jeratt shook his head. Behind them, the sound of Ander waking, the first long breath, the stirring beneath his rough blanket.

“I have.”

Kerian glanced over Jeratt’s shoulder.

“When?” she asked, as though she didn’t see Jeratt’s scowl.

“A few years ago.” Ander sat up. “Not to the sea, not past the mountains, but almost to them. My father was from Lindalenost, a little town near that lake. It’s called Linden Lake because it’s all edged with linden trees. They look like mist, the trunks are so gray. When he was murdered... well, we went there with his body so his family could lay him to rest among his kin.”

Kerian considered this. Then she said, “We’ve heard there are Knights deployed in the south and draconians with them.”

Ander nodded.

“We’ve heard they pretty much own the roads,” Jeratt said, his voice hard with suspicion. “What do you know, boy?”

“Not much, except I heard about the Knights and draconians.” He twisted a wry grin. “But that I heard from a traveler at the mill.”

“Could we go there for a time?” Kerian asked.

Again, Ander shook his head. “The village is right on the Qualinost Road. We’d be seen by Knights and draconians, but we could go into the forest, deep. They have small settlements here and there, sometimes just a few houses gathered around a tavern and a river ford. The Knights won’t go far into the forest—”

Jeratt rose. “Because of that weird slipping of your senses.” He scuffed away the map. “Shouldn’t be a problem that far down there, or did your kinfolk say it is?”

Ander looked from Kerian to the half-elf. “I told you, I haven’t heard from them since my father’s funeral.”

Jeratt looked up at the sky again. Kerian followed his glance and saw the stars fading before the gray light of dawn. “Okay, let’s go. Deeper into the forest.”

The three companions ranged far from territory any of them knew. Kerian felt the excitement of strange places when she turned her face to the winds coming down from the northern arm of the Elfstream, there known as the White-Rage, the border between Qualinesti and haunted Darken Wood in Abanasinia. Through the pale winter days, gray with threat and white with snow, Ander ran beside them, an eager boy who sometimes looked back. He had not in all his life been so far from home; he had never tasted water from the Elfstream or hunted fat quail so far north as this watery border between the kingdom of the elves and the lands of the humans. These far reaches of the kingdom overflowed with wonder for him. The young elf shone brighter the farther they traveled.

“I don’t think he had a very good life back home,” Kerian said to Jeratt, one night when they two sat watch.

Jeratt didn’t answer at once. He’d become reconciled to the idea that Kerian had dropped this village lad into their hands, but only grudgingly. He stubbornly didn’t trust the boy, who stubbornly did not trust him. Mostly, and this he’d made clear to her, he didn’t like it that Kerian had brought Ander to their rendezvous at King’s Haunting. He didn’t like being forced into a choice he would not have made.

Jeratt spat into the fire, making the embers hiss. “Thinkin’ about stepfathers and old nursery stories, are you? Don’t be a fool, Kerianseray.”

She considered asking him what senseless thing she’d done or said this time to have earned the name of fool. She did not. Kerian was growing weary of Jeratt’s scorn.

When she said nothing, he looked at her sourly. “Have y’not considered that the boy’s a little in love?”

Kerian laughed, genuinely surprised. “No. I’ve considered that he lived among people who would beat him and kill his dog.” Her voice growing lower, she said, “I’ve considered that you must be a hard and unwelcoming sort in his eyes.”

They said little more, and for a long while the subject didn’t come up again.

They hunted and they trapped. Ander didn’t have much skill at hunting large game, or even small, but he was a good hand at the preservation of what Kerian and Jeratt brought down. He knew how to smoke even fish so they were palatable days later. Their wallets were never empty of food, even when the territory they roamed might be.

Like wolves, they stayed long enough in good hunting territory to rest and eat and left when signs showed that game was moving or that elves or even Knights were near.

The latter didn’t happen often. They kept to the deep woods and all through the rest of winter saw only a few lone elves hunting, and once, chanced to see two dark-armored Knights meeting at a fording place. Kerian had been all for staying, concealed, to listen. Jeratt had slipped a callused palm over her mouth to quell protest, glared lightning at Ander, silently commanding that he follow, and hustled her away.

Later, his eyes ablaze, he’d grabbed her, a hand on each side of her head and said, “What in the name of all gone gods do you care what Thagol’s vermin has to say?” He’d gripped hard. “You want to keep this pretty head on your shoulders, Kerianseray, all you care about is how to stay out of their sight.”

Wide-eyed, Ander watched the two quarrel, and that night, when he thought her sleeping, he ventured a question of the half-elf.

“Who is she, Jeratt?” Though he’d seen no sign of it—and an admirer would look hard—he ventured what he imagined was a man’s question. “Is she your lover?”

The half-elf laughed. “Not her. She’s the friend of an old friend who has a high regard for her.”

Kerian lay in the dark, eyes shut and thinking about what she had overheard. At first she thought Jeratt referred in some oblique way to the king, but soon she realized that wasn’t it. Her brother? No, they never spoke of her brother, and it had been months since she had word of Iydahar. The last person Jeratt had spoken with at the falls was Elder. Elder, who’d named her Killer and made a prediction that she’d earn that name over and again.

Puzzled, Kerian realized that the old woman must have charged Jeratt with her safety.

Even in this mildest of winters the three had to pour all their energies into securing food and shelter. She no longer required Jeratt to tell her such things as what creatures came to water near their sheltering cave. Now it was she who showed Ander the difference between the mark of a hare and a rabbit, the print of a wolf and that of a dog.

“They run feral,” Kerian instructed him about dogs, “then they are as dangerous as wolves, for they remember how it is their far grandfathers lived or how they died. If they are not feral, still they are dangerous, for they slip out from a town, away from a farm, and then you want to be as careful because that means there are elves about.”

“How about the draconians—how will we know when they are about?” Ander inched closer to the fire, the light and the warmth. “Will they pursue us into the forest?”

When she said nothing, Ander looked to Jeratt, who shrugged. “We won’t likely find them roaming the forest, but I don’t doubt they are quartered around here. They keep on the move, like us, but,” he said with a grin, “we will smell them before they smell us.”

At the end of winter, the three drifted south and followed the Elfstream along its westernmost banks. They continued to avoid roads and fed themselves from the bounty of the land. They gradually approached the legendary Forest of Wayreth. Here they came across signs of Knights more often than anywhere they’d been. Kerian was eager to understand why Lord Thagol’s men were so thickly clustered here, why they saw the main roads widened and scarred, looking much like the Qualinost Road near the capital.

“Usual reason,” Jeratt said.

They sat on a treed hill, a bluff overhanging a road. Piles of newly raised earth lined the raw edges, trees killed for being in the way made fanged barriers into the forest. Beyond, across the road and into the forest, lay a town of some size. The smoke of many chimneys made an orderly climb to the sky.

“Roads here are widened to let tribute wagons pass. Knights are stationed in the larger towns to make sure all goes well on the roads, and more Knights come to sweep out into the countryside to make sure everything gets safely through the roads.” He pointed to a place north of the town to where a blacker, thicker smoke rose. “Forge there, and it don’t look like a small one. See—there’s water. You just see the silver through the trees. Might be that’s an armorer or a swordsmith. Dragon likes that stuff as much as she like gold and jewels.”

Somewhere, not far, surely, a tavern quartered Lord Thagol’s Knights or fed them or endured them. Another barmaid tried to elude a rough grab, another serving boy was kicked hard to get him moving faster. These things were happening nearby, or they would be soon, for that was the vile illness spreading over the Qualinesti kingdom.

The Elfstream became their road, the river winding from the foothills of the easternmost reaches of the curving spur of the Kharolis Mountains up across the northern border of the kingdom where a branch became the Dark-water River, the waters spilling to Darken Wood. Another, mightier trunk became the swift White-Rage and defined the borders between a free land and a captive kingdom. Kerian wanted to go there, all the way north, and breathe the air of a Free Realm. Jeratt had no objection, and faithful Ander would have followed anywhere. They found that they must keep to the deeper forest not only to hunt but to keep out of the sight of regular Knightly patrols.

“Ain’t like in the home-wood,” Jeratt said, “There they didn’t like to come in too far. Here—” He spat. “Ain’t like in the home-wood.”

Kerian thought of that word, “home-wood,” and she wondered whether Jeratt was ready to return to the eastern part of the forest, back the falls and his friends. She didn’t ask him, not then, for if he was feeling ready, she was not. She reveled in the new paths, in encountering places she’d never seen nor even imagined. The foothills of the Kharolis Mountains lay snug between the arms of the rising hills. Here they occasionally encountered elves who made Kerian wonder why her brother considered the Qualinesti effete. Farmers in their narrow dales, these were folk who had never traveled so far as the capital for a festival day, who lived their lives by clock of the sun and the calendar of the seasons. They were not wealthy, unless in the good rich soil they farmed.

“Aye, and in peace,” said one, a young farm wife whose husband had come across the travelers at a narrow stream at the edge of the wood and invited them to share the evening meal.

Her husband, Felan, eyed Kerian’s tattoos, the weathered faces and rough dress of all three. “Knights all over the place, but we know how to recognize them. Meantime—” he slid a basket of bread and rolls across the table to Ander as his pretty wife refilled their mugs with beer “—we have a tradition of hospitality in these dales, and no Knight’s going to break that.”

“Do they trouble you much?” Kerian asked. She plucked a roll from the breadbasket, broke it open, and covered it in both honey and butter.

The elf shrugged. “We never forget they’re there, them and their beast-men, but they don’t bother us much. We’re not worth the trouble.”

Kerian raised a skeptical eyebrow, for this seemed like a wealthy enough farmstead, and laughed. Felan motioned for her to rise and follow him. Curious, she did. He opened the door to the fading light of day and stepped into his dooryard.

“Look,” he said, pointing. “This farm lies in a very narrow dale, and the way in—as you saw—is hard.” He pointed behind the house to the stony hills rising up on all side. “The way out is harder still. We’re not easy pickings. It’s like that all over these dales.”

The sky hung in deepening darkness over the farmhouse. The sounds of night creatures drifted from field and forest. Kerian heard an owl, and the silvery song of the stream at the edge of the newly planted cornfield.

“Will you stay the night?” he asked. “You and your companions?”

They were good folk, these farmers. Kerian found herself sitting up late into the night talking, listening to their stories of farm life, their hopes for the newly planted crop. The tales turned to rumors heard about the Knights and how they had, indeed, set up outposts in the larger towns. A little farther east, “between here and poor Qualinost,” no one passed on the roads without first having to beg a Knight’s grace. “Now you never heard about that kind of thing here in this part of the kingdom. Not till lately,” Felan said.

According to him, restrictions in the capital had grown tighter since autumn. Kerian thought of Gil, of the Queen Mother, and wondered whether this meant their cherished plans for a treaty between elves, humans, and dwarves had fallen to ruin.

Moving north along the foothills, keeping far from the chance of running into Knights or draconians, Kerian and her companions found that most farmers in the dales were of the same mind as the farmer and his wife. They were genuinely pleased to welcome travelers, especially hunters who arrived with a brace of quail at the belt or a string of fat fish to offer to the evening meal. These folk were generous with food and fire and news.

Kerian learned that the foothills farther north weren’t so softly green as those in the south, and the soil was stony and stingy, not the kind a farmer likes. She was warned that she wouldn’t find much hospitality from the mountain outlaws. From the sound of them, these were not the type of men and women she’d encountered near Qualinost. These belonged to no king, to no land, and had lived unchecked for generations uncounted.

“Keep away from them,” warned Bayel, a farmer’s young son. “They have no interest in anything but what they can take from you, starting with your life.”

“Do they trouble the Knights much?”

He shrugged. “They mostly run on the west side of the mountains and a little down into the forest there. The Knights don’t go that far, not yet. They’re set up in the towns east of the spur. For now.”

Bayel sounded like a keen-thinker, like one who knew how to listen and see how things might go. Kerian asked if he’d heard anything about Lord Thagol himself.

The farmer shrugged. “He’s been glimpsed here and there. I’ve never seen him, but I heard from someone in a tavern that he looks like a ghost, pale and dark-eyed. You get the feeling of ghosts, so my friend said. It’s all cold around him.”

Jeratt snorted. “Aye, well, that’d be him. Face like a fire-scar, thinkin’ all the time about killing. Out east, I saw him more than once, saw him with his Knights. He’s a Skull Knight, and them’s the worst. They say he can get right into an enemy’s head and next thing you know you’re having nightmares you never had before. I don’t know about that, but Kerian’ll tell you, he’s the one ordered the killing of elves—Kagonesti and Qualinesti—in the eastern part of the kingdom. Bastard’s pikin’ heads on the bridge in Qualinost”

“Draconians are helping ’em.” Bayel took a long breath and let it out again. In the room beyond the hearth-room the voices of his parents murmured. “One killed my cousin,” he said low. “Killed him for traveling without a permit. He was leaving his own farm, out by Lindalenost, heading down the road to visit a kinsman. Who thought you’d need permission for that, eh?” The boy’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Not me, and I don’t see how that’s right”

Silence drifted into the room. The farmer poked his fire again. He leaned toward Kerian from out of the shadows, his face bright in the fading light. “Stay with us,” he said, urging and eager. He looked past her to Ander and Jeratt. “All of you, of course.”

Ander moved restlessly. Jeratt saw that and elbowed him still.

“We’re not staying,” Kerian said gently. “We have to keep moving.”

The young man’s eyes lighted with interest. “I’d like to be doing that myself,” he said. He looked right and left, as though someone might be concealed in the deepening shadows of the falling hearth fire. “I’d like to pay back one of them Knights. Or a draconian.”

It should have been all that was said, that night before the dying fire, but Kerian said one thing more: “Do others feel the way you do?”

“Plenty. Lots of talk goes on in the kitchens of farmhouses, but not much gets done.”

Kerian took those words with her as she and Jeratt and Ander left in the morning. They traveled north that day and steered wide of the unwelcoming places where bandits roamed or Knights were known to pass through. That night they made the first camp they’d had out of doors in several weeks, welcoming the starry roof, the embracing fragrance of the forest. Kerian took the first watch, and Jeratt sent Ander off to sleep, warning that the last watch would be his. They sat quietly for a while, neither speaking, each listening to the night song. The moon rose, climbing the trees and hanging high above the boughs.

“Tell me what you’re thinkin’, Kerian.”

She glanced at him and nodded. She poked the fire, gathered up her thoughts.

“They’re good folk here in the dales, Jeratt. I’ve spent most of my life in the city.” She stirred the fire and made the flames flare. “In the service of a senator and…” Sparks sailed up to the sky. “And in the confidence of a king. I’ll tell you, Jeratt—the king watches the Knights rule his city, hears how they treat his kingdom.” She shook her head. “If he saw what I’ve seen since autumn, if he heard what I’ve heard—”

“What would he do?”

The scornful sneer, the sudden anger flashing in Jeratt’s eyes irritated Kerian. “He would do anything and everything, if he could. He is a king with no court, the ruler of a Senate that holds all the power—”

“—and hands it over to Thagol.”

“He is powerless, I tell you.” Kerian shook her head, frowning. “As long as he has no army, Gilthas is tied, just like you say, hand and foot, but if he had an army…” She leaned forward. “One no one could say was his, but one he would know is his. If he had a fast-striking army—warriors who weren’t quartered anywhere, who couldn’t be tracked…”

Jeratt’s eyes lighted. “One that ran like ghosts, striking hard and fast and vanishing into the night.”

She smiled. “You sound like you’re ahead of me.”

He nodded. “Long years ago, with the prince, we had such an army. I came up with him from Silvanesti and got kind of good at forest fighting.” He laughed grimly. “Hit those city elves and ran, hit and ran, us and the Kagonesti. Would’ve won, too if it hadn’t been for dragons and bad, bad luck. Would’ve been one kingdom then, a kingdom for all elves.”

Kerian listened to the night, the rising wind that smelled of rain. She looked past Jeratt to Ander, beyond him, south to the dales where farmers still remembered how to greet travelers well and where the people were beginning to resent the mail-fisted Knights. In the wind and the hissing of the fire she heard words from an old woman she hadn’t seen in nearly a year.

Killer!

“I’m thinking,” she said, “that here is where to start.”

Jeratt laughed, startling Ander awake. “You know what to do with them once you flush them out of the dales, the woods, and the hills?”

Again, Kerian’s long, slow smile. “No, I don’t, but you do. Don’t you, Jeratt?”